phphelp

oprpg

Alright... for my site I am making a fighting system where you get to fight imaginary creatures. I am stuck at one part though, and that is when the creature attacks. In the database I have a table called fight_creatures . In that there is a row "Attacks" (text), where I seperate by commas the attack id's they can do (1,5,6,9). I have another table called fight_cattacks, which a row called id, name, and whatitdoes.

How would I make it so that it chooses randomly between the attacks and then echo's the "whatitdoes"?

Would there also be a way to make it so that if you put a number more than once (1,5,6,9,1) there would be a greater probability for that number.

Thanks tons,
Matt

AstroTeg

I'm being technical. Lets get you up to speed on some terminology real quick...

A row in a table represents a related collection of data. A row contains fields or columns. Each field or column contains an individual piece of data.

there is a row "Attacks" (text)

I think you mean to say, "there is a field called Attacks"

No biggie. But I want to avoid confusion in the future...

From the sounds of it, you have 1 field with a comma seperated list of available attacks. It looks like you already have a lookup table for these individual attacks. But there appears to be a problem in how you're associating the various attacks with a creature. You rarely want to store array data in 1 field. If you have the urge to store an array, then its time to create more tables. In this case, you need a cross reference table to associate a creature to the various attacks available to it (assuming this is what you're looking for).

Its pretty easy. You create one additional table which has two fields. One for the creature ID and one for the attack ID.

Then you list the creature and 1 attack per row in that table. If the creature has 5 attacks, then it gets five rows in the table.

With this, you can do inner joins (and/or outer joins depending on your needs) and quickly determine how many types of attacks a creature can do which also makes doing random selections a bit easier too (you could do "[query] ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 0,1" I think to get 1 random attack - but I haven't tested this or the syntax for errors).